Good things come ‘Packed With Purpose’
Good Things Come Packed With Purpose
By LEE A. LITAS
For 22nd Century Media
Packed With Purpose. Phone: 844-797-Gift (4438) or for more information see: packedwithpurpose.gifts
Surveying her company’s junk food-laden kitchen last December, Highland Park native, Leatt Rothchild, had an epiphany: Wouldn’t it be great if corporate America could thank their employees/clients/partners with a better gift, one that exemplifies their values and commitment to improving their community?
A Peace Corps volunteer and Wharton MBA, Rothchild consulted to Fortune 500 company’s chief sustainability officers, advising how best to manage their corporate funds and better invest in society.
“I just thought – people are sending (holiday and thank you) gifts anyhow. You might as well just get a gift that also is funneling money back to communities that need it or to organizations that are doing good,” said Rothchild.
So for her eldest daughter’s first birthday, Rothchild decided to test her idea and make what she terms a ‘low fidelity prototype,’ placing products from a number of social enterprises into simple craft store boxes. She added a make-shift logo and then gave this ‘goodie bag’ to all the attending parents.
“I was strategic and gave a not-great version of my current gift box to my friends, then told them I would follow up with a 10-minute market research phone call,” recalled Rothchild.
To her delight, her friends – themselves professionals, committed to their communities and to ‘doing good’ – loved the idea.
“It was a pretty good sample size,” said Rothchild who scored her first orders from this first round with gifts to kids’ teachers and samples for her friends’ company marketing directors.
Now after just a year, Packed With Purpose has sold close to 5000 gifts and Rothchild has several dozen social enterprise purveyor partners who supply meaningful gift box items.
One such company is the Floured Apron out of Winnetka whose mission is to empower women from underserved communities with the training, knowledge and support to forge a new and more economically-secure career path.
Leann Drew of Evanston recently completed one of their full-time programs which consisted of daily classroom instruction, kitchen training, bakery production and even certification.
“I was not in a good place,” explained Drew. “And (The Floured Apron) pulled me out of bed every day. It’s more than baking. Anything you can think of, somebody is there to help and encourage you with it.”
Most recently, Rothchild bought 950 bags of freshly-baked granola from the Floured Apron, a $6,000 purchase. That one order alone pays for an entire class of trainees to go through one of Floured Apron’s curriculums.
Rothchild pays her purveyors full price for their goods which, in turn, enables them to provide more social programs and help more individuals.
Another company, the zen of slow cooking, is based in Lake Forest. Owners Meg Barnhart and Jane McKay create gourmet slow cooker spice blends that are then packaged by adults with disabilities.
So, by extension, Rothchild is also giving employment opportunity to all those individuals.
Beyond the Box
Packed With Purpose gift boxes range from $25 to over $200, with the higher-end offering premium products like quality wooden cutting boards. Of course, these are made by a company in the city which prevents thousands of tons of otherwise good building materials from hitting landfills by repurposing it.
“You would have found this serving board at a Williams-Sonoma,” explained Rothchild, “But now you get to buy it from Packed With Purpose where you know that not only are you helping prevent material from just going into landfills but they employ adults that have barriers to employment; teaching them carpentry and retail skills.”
Each PWP gift comes with a stack of cards explaining the products contained inside and the organizations that produced them; their missions and impact. Additionally, Rothchild plans to issue an impact report to enable her clients to realize the effect of all the dollars they spend.
“We are going to go back and give people a one-to-one correlative understanding of what each gift has allowed to happen on the side of the creators and allow them to see how much hope and ability to aid others that further purchases can hold,” said Rothchild.
From women’s empowerment to youth development to wellness, Rothchild believes that people who are already socially conscious are attuned to the opportunity to make a difference in their own back yard. “It’s an inherent feeling. People want to do good and (when) they know that there are opportunities to give back in the community, for them this is a no brainer.”
The Long View
While the majority of Rothchild’s purveyors come from across the US and offer services ranging from aiding underserved communities to the environmental to animals, others, like chocolate bar producer Harper Macaw out of Washington, D.C., even have international reach.
“I am buying products outright from this organization that sources all their cacao from Brazil then reinvests in reforestation efforts. So there is a story behind each product,” said Rothchild who is looking to triple her number of purveyors, both domestically and abroad.
The benchmark for her suppliers is that they create at once unique and high-quality products so that PWP can offer a premium item but also that, “They’re doing good. Period,” said Rothchild. “What makes the gift special is that…there is a story of impact behind it.”
And whether buying one or 1500 PWP gift boxes at a time, “It’s a wonderful thing to have clients that are just excited about showcasing their values and their desire to do good. They’re reinvesting into society.”
